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From: Leon Brocard Date: 14:21 on 19 Jan 2004 Subject: VNC VNC is a wonderful idea. Make anything a remote desktop. Anything can be a client. As always, it falls down in implementation. Software! OK, so I'm mostly talking about Mac OS X VNC clients and servers here. But wait, isn't this supposed to be a simple open protocol that anyone can implement? So why is it dog slow and why do I keep on finding VNC clients and servers that don't interoperate? It's just silly. But not as silly as the name "Chicken of the VNC" that is a popular OS X VNC client. Or it would be, I presume, if I could get it to talk to anything. Thus I blame everyone. It shouldn't be hard to write a client. Writing a server could be a little tricker, granted, but a client for a well-documented not-really-new-is-it protocol? Hey, maybe I'll do it myself 'cos everyone else appears to be failing completely. I hear rdesktop is better. But can it really be? I mean, it's software... Bah, Leon
From: Leon Brocard Date: 15:41 on 11 Sep 2003 Subject: Progress bars There is so much I hate about progress bars that I don't quite know where to begin. First off, let's make the assumption that progress bars (or some sort of progress display) might be useful. If something is going to take a while, it might be useful to inform the user. Even better, you could inform the user the expected time the whole process will take. Or the expected time to the end, and where in the process you are. It just makes sense. Programs like rsync which lack such progress indicators should be shot[1]. A progress bar should have a bar. The bar should start at the left, increase during the process, and get to the right. When it's got to the right, the operation is complete. Some sort of ETA might be nice. If this is an installer, the installer should quit. If there are things to do after the progress bar, the programmer is stupid and they should be included into the progress bar. And about ETAs: let's not be too accurate, because you know some foolish programmer will have an ETA that jumps from 2:01 to 2:13 and back again as it is overly accurate. This is silly. Mac OS X has vague ETAs, like "Under five minutes", "Under a minute". This is nice and friendly. I was installing a driver and utility disk for a digital camera the other day. The primary installer really installed lots of little installers which installed other things, most of which had a couple of progress bars. Multiple progress bars are stupid. Roll them into one. This installation process showed me 28 progress bars. 28! All I wanted to know was if it was almost over and how long it would take, not the details of every file of every package it was trying to install. Bad programmer, no cookie! Leon [1] So rsync has a progress bar for a file. So what? I'm transferring 200k small files, and it fails to do anything useful for that
From: Leon Brocard Date: 10:16 on 14 Aug 2003 Subject: Openoffice.org Now, before I start, let me say that spreadsheet programs are a wonderful invention. It's amazing how far we've come with them. I can send spreadsheets to people and they can load them, pretend they understand the statistics, and produce pretty graphs. This offloads work from me. This can only be a good thing. Now, in the good old days, we used Excel. If fact, ExcelXP still uses the old Excel95 engine as nobody understands it and it hasn't been hacked upon in years apparently. Excel has arbitrary limits - for example you can only have a maximum of 65,535 rows. It's commercial software that hasn't been updated for a while, so you kind of expect this suckage. I don't have CSVs smaller than 65,535 rows any more... [So I've used Gnumeric in the past, but now it's complaining about locales and failing to load the CSV, sigh] So where do I go? To the new, exciting, open-source, office productivity suite that is OpenOffice.org. No, really, "OpenOffice.org is both an Open Source product and a project". Huh? What? URL eq project? And why are they abbreviating it to OOo? My thought processes go: It's all written in C++, it's open source, they've been working on it for yonks, it can't have any arbitrary limits... How wrong can I be? OOo has a 32,000 row limit. 32,000! That's half of Excel's arbitrary limit! They've noted this as a bug since 2001: http://sc.openoffice.org/row-limit.html I hates Ooo! I hates software! Consider me not impressed, Leon
From: Leon Brocard Date: 12:28 on 12 Aug 2003 Subject: dhcpcd First, why is dhcpcd a client and a daemon? What's going on? Why does it need to be a daemon if it is just a client and finds you an IP address every so often? I mean, that's worse than the X server/client terminology. OK, so we all know about DHCP. dhcpcd talks the magic protocol talk and finds you a new email address. All well and fine so far. So we're playing with a new AIX box in our test environment and it all seems good. The test environment uses DHCP but all is well. So we move it into the work environment so that we can start using it. Everything is well and we hack hack hack on it and start trusting it. Then an hour later after the move, it drops off the Net. Completely. No pinging. No routing. No ssh. Off. We ping syssies, get a console up on it (it has a DVD player but no video card, sigh) and try diagnosing. Turns out dhcpcd tries to recheck its IP lease every hour. The work environment didn't have a DHCP server, so what did it do? Instead of hanging on to the known, working IP address it set its IP address to 0.0.0.0 and kept on trying to find a DHCP server. Gah! Why is software so clueless? Keep on going as you were in the face of adversity, don't panic and drop off the Net! Static IP set, dhcpcd disabled, which I now hate. DHCP might be nice, if only it weren't for software... Leon
From: Leon Brocard Date: 15:10 on 11 Aug 2003 Subject: Software Those electrons, those characters, the source code, the binaries... I hates it all! Leon
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